Copyright and authors

[Shirley Field]

Roger - If you wouldn't mind elaborating, I would like more about the
Ozu situation of which you speak.

Toho won their lawsuit in July. Though they didn't get nearly as much
as they would have liked (Cosmo Coordinate was ordered to pay $78,127
rather than the $1.3 million Toho asked for), the court did rule that
the movies should be protected until 38 years after Kurosawa's death.
All I can find right now in English is a Variety article on the case:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118006892.html?categoryid=19&cs=1&nid=2562.
(I don't guess anyone knows why news sites like Mainichi and Yomimuri
remove their news articles so quickly?)

You can read the court proceedings here:
http://bizlaw.jp/hanketsu/2009/07/206849.html

All the best,
Shirley Field


On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Roger Macy <macyroger at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Back in March 2008, Aaron was giving us an interesting account of Toho
> asserting individual author's rights in an attempt to extend copyright on
> the films of Kurosawa Akira, against the weight of the 1971 copyright laws
> [''Kurosawa films and copyright suit'].
> I'd be interested in any update on that, as well as whether anyone had an
> opinion as to whether Toho's assertion, is legally compatible with
> Shochiku's of renewed copyright on Ozu silent films as from the 80s, on
> their english-subtitled prints, which do not mention the name of any
> translator, subtitler or any other author of the new work.
> Happy New Year,
> Roger